Wu Jing
Laziness is the touchstone, the watershed, at the crossroads of the private sphere and public life, between real conditions and the ideal world.
—Frederick Jensen, On Laziness – From Nietzsche to Foucault
Since the dawn of mankind, laziness has been with us, it has a long history, and it has a bad reputation. Unlike leisure from a noble birth, lazy and humble, he has long been saddled with infamy and was once one of the "Seven Deadly Sins" and was once eye-catching. However, it is the secret lover of leisure (leisure, although combined with the work (labor) of achievement, but obsessed with laziness), and among their many illegitimate children, boredom and daze are the two most famous, because together they launched a protracted daydream movement and became an inexhaustible source of human creativity.
In the 3rd century AD, the desert father's spiritual theorist Evaglius Pontegus defined eight evils that undermined one's spirituality in His Treatise on the Eight Evil Spirits: gluttony, lust, greed, melancholy, rage, laziness, vanity, and arrogance. Here, Ponzi refers to laziness as the "Devil of Noon" and asserts that it is the most difficult of all demons to deal with. "It attacks the monk at the fourth hour, trapping his soul until the eighth hour (i.e. from ten to fourteen o'clock)." The Midday Demon attacks the body and soul, depriving the exhausted monk of all his willpower.
Poster of the Seven Deadly Sins movie
In the late 6th century, Pope Gregory I reduced the eight crimes mentioned above to seven, classifying vanity as arrogance, melancholy to laziness, and jealousy, which became known and frighteningly "Seven Deadly Sins" (until the end of the 20th century, in the famous film Seven, directed by David Fincher, the fate of victor, the drug dealer who committed the "sloth" was still chilling). As a result, laziness gradually evolves from evil to evil, and it seems to have fallen into the abyss of eternal doom. Almost at the same time, Saint Benedict of Nursia, one of the founders of Western monasticism, emphasized the obligation to work in the Canon. He declared: "Idleness is the great enemy of the soul, so at some point the monks should work with their hands." Obviously, laziness has always been the enemy of labour.
Allegorical Paintings of Laziness and Jealousy ("Lazy" was pulled out of a conch shell by a snake and fell down)
In the 13th century, the philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas laid out a definition of laziness that was common in the medieval West in his Theologies. He calls laziness an "unbearable annoyance" that penetrates despair into people's hearts and makes them "mentally aroused by anything." Lazy people "are like objects eroded by acid, becoming cold". Aquinas's comparison of laziness and coldening in the presence of acid undoubtedly thought of the kinship of the words acidiosus and accidioso. From Hippocrates to the ancient theories of medicine advocated by Galen, the excess of black bile in the sad and depressed people is classified as crazy stupidity.
A century later, both the poets Dante and Petrarca inherited Aquinas' arguments, each depicting a close connection between laziness and melancholy, the laziness of the melancholy like a wound that never scars or heals, leading to fatal depression. Gradually, laziness crossed the religious realm and slowly invaded secular society. Along with laziness comes ignorance, procrastination, prevarication, and avoidance of effort, making it impossible for lazy people to keep up with the times or move against the trend of the times. Their lives have achieved nothing, they have been wasted, and they seem to have lost any meaning.
In the 16th century, the French writer Francois Rabelais captured this crucial shift most keenly in His Biography of the Giants: from a value system—the monastic piety exclusive to the congregation—to Renaissance values—humanist active involvement in social affairs. After condemning the uselessness of monastic life, Rabelais returned to the crucial question of how to make good use of his time. He wrote: "I never force myself to pray, prayer exists for man, but man is not born for prayer. Rabelais believed that laziness was reprehensible because it undermined the principle of human beings: the use of "free will." The idea that man is the center of creation and that man should be the master of his own life marks a break with the past. In this regard, the reformers of the same century did not hesitate to give up, although Jean Calvin relegated the author of The Legend of the Giants to a blasphemy.
Although the vast Renaissance movement revalued the entire value system, the situation of laziness did not improve. In 1580, the French writer Montaigne published the influential Collection of Essays, and unlike previous writers, he no longer sought inspiration from the Bible and its commentaries, but from famous ancient figures and Greco-Roman philosophers. Citing the theories of the Stoics, Epicureans, and skeptics, he cites the examples of emperors or conquerors, praising the courage of the Roman emperors who "stood" dead and praising the noble souls of those who "devoted themselves forever to the good, noble, and just cause." In his view, laziness is a sign of physical inaction, but also a symbol of cowardice and low soul.
Montaigne believed that not only must the monarch restrain himself and set an example for his subjects, but everyone should straighten out his thinking and be free from vices. Laziness is the free rambling of melancholy in the absence of reason, but also the fishing net of thought and the scorch of passion. In layman's terms, a lazy person is a person who "doesn't do anything, doesn't care about anything" person. A sonnet by the 17th-century French poet Saint-Amand entitled Le Paresseux is a perfect illustration of it:
I was in bed in a daze, unable to move,
Crushed by laziness, dragged down by melancholy,
Like a hare being stripped of its bones and sleeping soundly on the pasture,
Like don Quixote, who is depressed and sorrowful.
I don't care about the Battle of Italy.
Not to mention the electors and the throne,
I sing a song for this laziness,
My soul was listless and could not find a way out.
In that era of great change, boredom was born out of great boredom. People recognize at a glance that it is born of laziness. As we all know, the lazy man only wants to have fun–he tries to have fun precisely to escape the boredom that makes him unable to extricate himself. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal echoed in his Meditations the Montaigne he loved and feared: "The only thing that can soothe our suffering is pastime... Otherwise we'll fall into boredom. Another French writer, La Bruyere, also held this view in The Theory of Personality: "Boredom enters the world through laziness; people seek pleasure, play, and socialize, in large part because of laziness." He even bluntly said: "People who love their work have themselves." "Laziness breeds boredom and prompts people to find pastimes and let themselves go."
If laziness has long been overpowered by the labor (labor) of its old rivals, from that time on it was simply trampled under its feet. Through the Reformation of Martin Luther in the 16th century (who famously proposed the "vocation") and the exposition of the value of labor by a large number of economists and thinkers such as William Petty, John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo in the 17th and 18th centuries, The world of labor and work has become a world of kings. Thus, on the level of political and economic significance, laziness is criticized as its opposite. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who served as French Minister of Finance, Secretary of State for the Crown and Secretary of State for the Navy, wrote in a letter of 22 September 1667 to the mayor and mayor of Auxerre: "Prosperity always comes from labor, and suffering arises from laziness. "Later, we saw the tremendous impetus and influence of Colbertism on the modernization of the French economy.
The Encyclopedia, proposed by Denis Diderot and d'Alembert, appeared between 1751 and 1772, and the entry for "work" wrote that one's "health, livelihood, ease, insight, and perhaps virtue" were all due to his daily work. In addition, the "Lazy" entry contains a professional opinion submitted by a medical doctor signed Louis de Jogoku Knight: "It is the root cause of many diseases, because it not only thickens bodily fluids and relaxes the body, but also stimulates the body and accelerates aging." "Medicine at the time believed that laziness triggered a range of disorders and conditions, such as gout, stones, scurvy, depression and mania. In other words, work promotes physical and mental health, while laziness is the cause of social structure and individual deterioration. As a result, laziness became a key issue of morality, politics, and medicine.
However, being low to the dust also means a possibility of not being extremely thai. The same French encyclopedic school was the first to discover the natural value of laziness. They often used the theme of laziness to extoll the beauty of the Garden of Eden, to the joy of nature, to the infancy of life and the carefree primitive state. Here, laziness is defined as the key to the primordial state. Is this a philosophical fiction of Genesis or the primitive reality of mankind? It doesn't really matter. Importantly, the state of nature and the love of work are the opposite of the two laws, which arise with group living. The world of work is fundamentally at odds with nature, but that is the price of civilization. Voltaire extolled the original happiness: "At the beginning of the birth of the world, the hand of nature's charity gave mankind an eternal rest, a time of pure silence. ”
On the Origin of Language
Throughout the Age of enlightenment, voices about justifying laziness reached their peak at Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In On the Origin of Language (1781), Rousseau wrote something rather shocking at the time: "Man lives to sleep, to do nothing, to stay still." "The natural state described as lazy and idle takes precedence, and the excitement of anxiety, foresight, and hard work does not arise until after living in groups. He went on to say bluntly: "Idleness is the first and greatest hobby of mankind after living." Thus, human beings are primarily driven by two passions: first, they are born lazy; and second, they are put into work for social or ethical reasons. And between the two, the former is the purpose of the latter. In Reverie of a Lonely Wanderer (1782), written in the first person, Rousseau examines the proposition in The Fifth Walk: "It is laziness that makes us diligent... Precious leisure is the first and foremost of all pleasures that I desire to indulge in. "Yes, laziness has a strong Oedipal complex.
Above all, Rousseau defined a new type of ethics for laziness. Here, he is not referring to a passive state of "doing nothing" or "not doing anything", but a state of mind that transcends all material interests. The human spirit is free from utilitarian thoughts and can think in the open sky. In other words, it is not insensitivity, but a vibrant presence, a potentially great cause, a promise of abundance: "I like to be busy with small things that don't matter, and I do a lot of things, but I don't finish a thing." To this end, Rousseau compares situations: laziness is equivalent to slavery if there is a lack of vitality and planning, but laziness makes freedom possible if it is injected with passion and excitement. In human history, Rousseau was the first to distinguish between positive and negative laziness, and pointed out the intrinsic relationship between laziness and freedom. We will see that this idea had a huge and far-reaching impact over the next two hundred years. It can be said that all the scientific and technological inventions and creations aimed at liberating human labor in later generations stem from active laziness, from cars to airplanes, from washing machines to air conditioners, from mathematical formulas to atomic bombs... This corresponds to Rousseau's conception that "labor is for laziness.". It seems that love enemies also have the possibility of becoming friends.
In the first half of the 19th century, the great human teacher Karl Marx was the first to discover and raise the problem of "human alienation" in capitalist society. He pointed out with a sharp eye that in the capitalist system, workers not only could not enjoy the creativity of labor, but were also bound by the wage system, and had to endure exploitation and gradually alienated. In other words, the laborer's desire for laziness stems from the exploitation and oppression of the capitalist system. A hundred years after Rousseau's death, laziness finally had the opportunity to turn itself around once and for all—no longer as an evil deed, a sin, a disease, but as a right to freedom. This resounding voice was amply heard by Paul Lafargue, a disciple and son-in-law of Marx and a member of the First International who founded the French Workers' Party with Jul Geide, in his famous essay "The Right to Be Lazy or the Right to Refuse to Work" (subtitled "Refuting the Right to Work in 1848") published in the newspaper Equal in 1880.
In The Right to Laziness, Lafarge exhorted the proletariat of the world to despise the evil theory of "production first." He cautioned that "the words instilled in them were sinister", declaring that the work to which they had been frantically engaged for a century "was the most terrible catastrophe ever suffered by mankind". He explicitly opposed bourgeois ideology and wanted to preach "the right to laziness, which is a million times more noble and sacred than the tuberculosis-like 'human right'". In his writing, laziness became the revolutionary motive force of the proletariat, a class that "included the producers of all civilized nations", who, after emancipating themselves, liberated all mankind, and restored freedom to those who worked as cattle and horses. If laziness, which was originally a mere rejection of individuals, now gives great revolutionary power to all oppressed laborers.
Dedicated to debunking the deception, the brilliant Marxist thinker refuted the Biblical curse that "you have to sweat until you return to earth." Labor does not make the whole society rich, far from it. Shareholders and businessmen earn wealth, but they impoverish the people who produce it. At the same time, he believes that the proletariat has been kidnapped by an alienated morbid enthusiasm for work, and constantly demands that the boss "give" himself a job. However, the price of labor frenzy is physical torture and mental hardship, which deprives the proletarian of humanity: "In capitalist society, work is the cause of all intellectual decline and skill deterioration. "Only laziness, that is, strikes, can restore their justice and restore their plundered humanity. Thus Farag sings: "Oh, the mother of laziness, art and noble virtue, comfort the anxieties of mankind!" ”
In the turbulent wave of proletarian strikes in the 19th century, the Western world discovered the lost Eden of the East as if it were discovering the New World of America—laziness not only won unprecedented rights, but also ushered in a magnificent turnaround. The distant and mysterious East, mixed with curiosity and melancholy, tempts guests from afar. From the high realism of Baudelaire to Gustave Flaubert to Karl Huysmans, poets draw material from distant and mysterious places to create entirely new sensations. In their eyes, everything here is "luxury, calm and pleasure". Baudelaire believes that the gentle swaying of the three-masted sailboat is like a state of natural suspension, which is the best portrayal of lazy happiness. Yes, the word "lazy" unique to the Orient, for the first time, has put a gorgeous coat on laziness, which is the poetic and dreamy form of laziness in the Orient. Unprecedentedly, laziness became an art of life. In his famous book "Yin Yi Li Praise" (1934), the Japanese aestheticist literary master Junichiro Tanizaki has a wonderful work of "The Theory of Laziness", which directly states that "'laziness' and 'burnout' are the characteristics of orientals, calling it 'the laziness of the East'. He adds that this deep-rooted trait is "conceived in our climate, terroir, and constitution."
"Yin Feng Praise"
In this way, the East acts as a magical mirror that illuminates the Western world created by the modernization of the 19th century. Laziness, originally a showdown of faith and temptation, has now become a magic weapon to slow down the hasty pace of industrial civilization. It is also used to deal with anxieties caused by the acceleration of the course of life and the fact that life is elsewhere. Melancholy laziness shifts from escapism to a denial of historical reality. In other words, laziness has gone from being an abomination, antisocial, and abnormal to a dream of a lost time, not for prayer or prayer, but for discovering a lost world, and the East still retains its memories of this world. The Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin declared to the world with his own deeds that Tahiti was a paradise where Westerners could learn "the knowledge of life" from barbarians and find Eve before committing original sin in Tahitian women. Here, Gauguin reclaimed the imagination and creativity that had faded away in modern Western societies dominated by the law of work supremacy. In 1919, the British writer William Somerset Maugham wrote a novel based on Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence, and over the past hundred years, the lasting influence of this novel has never disappeared.
In the 20th century, laziness, after experiencing the double blessing of entitlement and poetry, almost formed a situation of confrontation with the world of work supremacy, and more importantly, it was protected by its mother. In 1932, Bertrand Russell, hailed as "the last encyclopedic figure of the West," wrote the famous In Praise of Idleness, in which he solemnly wrote: "In today's world, the belief that work is virtue is causing a great deal of scourge, and the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized reduction in work." Of course, we must see that Russell is not so much singing of laziness as of his mother, leisure, as he later aphorism: "It must be admitted that the wise use of leisure is the result of civilization and education." People who have worked for a long time all their lives, suddenly have nothing to do, must be very idle. However, without considerable leisure, people will be out of touch with many of the most beautiful things. ...... Leisure cultivated art, discovered science, produced various works, invented philosophy, and improved social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed is often initiated from above. Without the idle class, humanity must not emerge from barbarism. ”
As one of the laziest but most creative peoples in the world, the French nation has fascinating qualities. Ever since Rousseau first sang an ode to laziness until the second half of the 20th century, the French continued to exalt laziness. Roland Barthes, the famous thinker and master of semiotics, wrote an essay for this purpose, entitled "The Right to Be Lazy", in which he subtly pointed out: "I will elicit this form of laziness in the name of Flaubert, which I call 'masinate'." In this case you do nothing, your mind swirls around... I often have such 'picklings', very frequently, but they don't last long, fifteen to twenty minutes at most... Then my courage came back. Then he introduced the art of distraction, "Laziness may be cutting as much time as possible and diversifying it." That's what I do on a small scale when I introduce distractions in my work. I cut time. It's a way of becoming lazy (toward laziness)." Finally, he gives an Oriental poetic definition of laziness: "Sit still and do nothing/ Spring comes / Grass grows on its own." ”
The Society of Punishment
In 1972, another world-renowned French thinker, Michel Foucault, published The Society of Punishment, in which he adhered to Rousseau's argument: "Human time and life are not labor in nature, but pleasure, pleasure, rest, need, moment, chance, violence, etc." Following this line of thought, it is not difficult to understand Foucault's famous aesthetic view of life: "From the point of view that the self is not a given, I think there is only one possible result: we must create ourselves into a work of art." Perhaps, this echoes the famous quote of the British writer Oscar Wilde: "A map of the world without utopias is simply not worth a look." This conclusion drawn by the bohemian slacker in his article "The Soul under Socialism" is close to Marx's idea: to automate work so that people have time to develop and realize themselves and enter the true kingdom of freedom.
The most intriguing contemporary remarks about laziness come from the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who, in Cold Memories: 1987-1990, spoke of three generations of his family, his grandfather as a farmer who did not stop working until his death, his father, a civil servant, who stopped working before retirement age (early retirement due to illness), and his university teacher "the chain of life has continued to the highest stage of laziness.". Bower believes that "this laziness has a rustic nature." It is based on the feeling of merit and 'natural' balance, and should never be done too much." Here Baudrillard returns to the proposition of the natural properties of laziness and writes the most rebellious and unruly text about laziness since Rousseau. Printed on a white wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai's 2019 special exhibition "Disappearing Techniques: Photography by Jean Baudrillard", it seems anachronistic but thought-provoking and memorable in our time of eternal emphasis on progress, competition and efficiency:
Laziness is a fateful strategy, and fate is a lazy strategy. ...... No matter how things go, I'm not going to change that perception. I hate the positive activities, innovation initiatives, social responsibilities, ambitions, and competition of my compatriots. These are exogenous, urban, efficient and ambitious values. These are industrial qualities. And laziness, it is a force of nature.
Editor-in-Charge: Zang Jixian
Proofreader: Yan Zhang